Letter of the Week – “The kind of sound my CD ‘audiophile’ friends can only dream about.”

Hot Stamper Pressings of Hippie Folk Rock Albums Available Now

One of our good customers had this to say about some Hot Stampers he purchased recently:

Hey Tom, 

Recently bought a Tarkio Hot Stamper and what a great album it is. This record has truly great ANALOG sound. The kind of sound my CD “audiophile” friends can only dream about. This recording is a lot of fun to listen to. There is much more to it than the songs that had airplay.

Anyway, another great find from the better records crew.

Jim S

Jim,

Thanks for your letter. This is one my favorite records too. I have it on tape and that tape has been played at least 500 times.

Along with Crosby, Stills and Nash’s debut, Tarkio represents the pinnacle of what we affectionately call Hippie Folk Rock.

On the best copies, the Tubey Magical acoustic guitar reproduction is some of the best we have ever heard, right up there with another record Stephen Barncard recorded, If Only I Could Remember My Name. As you may have read elsewhere on the site, the guy is a genius.

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Audiophiles Should Skip Swingin’ the ’20s on OJC

Hot Stamper Pressings of Contemporary Jazz Records Available Now

This album is fairly common on the OJC pressing from 1988, but more recently we’ve found the sound of the OJC pressings we’ve played seriously wanting. They have the kind of bad reissue sound that plays right into the prejudices of record collectors and audiophiles alike, the kind for whom nothing but an original will do.

They were dramatically smaller, flatter, more recessed and more lifeless than even the worst of the ’70s LPs we played. (We tend to like those, by the way.)

The lesson? Not all reissues are created equal. Some OJC pressings are great — including even some of the new ones — some are awful, and the only way to judge them fairly is to judge them individually, which requires actually playing a large sample.

Since virtually no record collectors or audiophiles like doing that, they make faulty judgments – OJC’s are cheap reissues sourced from digital tapes, run for the hills! – based on their biases and reliance on inadequate sample sizes.

You can find those who subscribe to this approach on every audiophile forum there is. The methods they have adopted do not produce good results, but as long as they stick to them, they will never have to worry about discovering that inconvenient truth.

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Grateful Dead – Wake Of The Flood

More of the Music of the Grateful Dead

  • With STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) grades throughout, this vintage copy could not be beat beat
  • Both of these sides gives you clean, clear, full-bodied, lively and musical analog sound from first note to last
  • A difficult album to find audiophile quality sound for; this is one of the best copies to ever hit the site
  • Marks and problems in the vinyl are sometimes the nature of the beast with these vintage LPs – there simply is no way around them if the superior sound of vintage analog is important to you
  • 4 stars: “Wake of the Flood was certainly as good – if not arguably better than – most of their previous non-live efforts.”

This is the album that comes after American Beauty on the Grateful Dead timeline, and while it’s certainly not in the same league as that masterpiece, there’s still a lot of good music on here.

Again, I think American Beauty is a stronger album, but this is a very good representation of the kind of jazzier sound The Dead carried on with for the next twenty-plus years. Many of these songs remained staples of their concert repertoire, including Stella Blue, Eyes Of The World, and Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo. You might get more incendiary performances of the tracks on the best of the band’s famous bootleg tapes, but you certainly won’t get sound this good. (more…)

Joe Cocker – Self-Titled (1972)

More of the Music of Joe Cocker

  • You’ll find STUNNING Shootout Winning Triple Plus (A+++) sound or close to it throughout this copy of Joe Cocker’s patented Blue-Eyed Soul album (only the second to hit the site in years)
  • Here are just a few of the things we had to say about this killer copy in our notes: “huge and weighty and rich”…”great bass and vox”…”sweet and tubey and open”…”great space and detail”
  • “Pardon Me Sir,” “High Time We Went,” “Black-Eyed Blues,” “Midnight Rider,” “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man” and “St. James Infirmary” – so many of his best songs
  • “With ‘St. James’ Infirmary,’ Joe Cocker has moved into a whole different sphere of musical activity, far distant from the rip-roaring anarchism of the Mad Dogs … This album is, when all be said and done, riddled with meaningful soul.” — Rolling Stone

Great sound for this rockin’ soul album with two live tracks. Just listen to the drums on “Black-Eyed Blues” — the way the percussion and bass mingle sonically with Alan White’s skins takes this listener right into the room where the magic happened.

Classic Tracks

On side one, there are three out of five you know or should know: “Pardon Me Sir,” “High Time We Went” and “Black-Eyed Blues.”

On side two, there are three out of four you know or should know: “Midnight Rider,” “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man” and “St. James Infirmary.”

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Letter of the Week – “The same in what sense?”

beatlessgtHot Stamper Pressings of Sgt. Peppers Available Now

A potential customer asked about some Beatles pressings he saw on our site:

  Hey Tom, 

I have the Beatles collection UK box set from the time frame you mentioned. [Most of our Beatles albums are from the 70s and early 80s.] The albums have the black Parlophone EMI label. Do you think they are the same as the album that is for sale?

Edward

Edward,

The same in what sense? No two records have the same sound, so in that sense, no, they cannot ever be the same. They can have the same labels, even the same stamper numbers, but they will always sound different on very good equipment, and when properly cleaned they will sometimes sound VERY different.

And the better your system, the more different they will sound.

If you absolutely love your Pepper from the box set and have played five or ten other pressings and found that it is the best sounding of them all, then you probably don’t need ours. You’ve already done a shootout and you’ve already found a winner. If that is the case, congratulations are in order.

But if you did not do a shootout, did not clean and play five or ten other copies, then our pressing should be quite a bit better, maybe even night and day better. No one can know until you play our copy against yours.

Your judgment is the final say on the matter, but you need a bunch of cleaned copies in order to make that judgment, and it looks like you do not have more than the one Pepper from the box.

At this point you really don’t know how good your Sgt. Pepper sounds, because you need other copies to play against it in order to know that.

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Debussy / La Mer / Reiner

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Claude Debussy Available Now

UPDATE 2026

This is a very old review, one which we ourselves may no longer agree with. If you see this record in the bins for cheap, give it a try, but don’t pay a high price for it on our say-so.

The record that contains our current favorite performance with top quality sound for La Mer was conducted by Ansermet for Decca in 1955. We rarely have it in stock

For Don Juan we like Haitink’s recording for Philips from 1975. Again, not one likely to be in stock.

Note that records made from 1955 to 1975 make up practically all of our offerings of classical and orchestral music.

In the 70s things went downhill, and quickly. Let me give you just one example:

A mediocre Decca recording from 1972 was remastered in 1981 by an audiophile label trying to “improve” it. Sure enough, with their ridiculously misguided mastering decisions and wacky cutting system, they made it even worse.

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Art Pepper – Smack Up on Contemporary

More of the Music of Art Pepper

  • This is a classic from Pepper – all the songs were written by saxophonists and he tears into them with gusto and naked emotion, the hallmarks of his playing style
  • This is some seriously good-sounding saxophone-led jazz, thanks to Roy DuNann and Lester Koenig
  • 4 1/2 stars: “Pepper is very much on top of his game throughout, ably demonstrating a capacity for precision and intimidating passion. Nowhere is proof more readily available than on these sides, which project Pepper at the peak of his craft.”

The horns are really jumpin’ out of the speakers here, but they never get hard or squawky like they do on some pressings. This combination of clarity and fullness is not easy to come by, but it lets the music flow in glorious waves of All Tube 1960 analog. With the always wonderful Jack Sheldon on trumpet, this is a great date from the Golden Age of Jazz Recordings. (more…)

Back to Back – A Classic Records Winner

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of Duke Ellington Available Now

 Duke Ellington And Johnny Hodges Play The Blues

UPDATE 2026

When this record came out in the 90s, we were happy to recommend it to our customers:

This is one of the better sounding Classic titles from their Verve series, and the music is excellent.

Finding a clean original is no mean feat, as I’m sure you can imagine.

I can find no record of us ever having done a shootout for it, which probably means that we just could not find enough clean original copies to do it and just gave up.

They sell for an average of $27.20 on Discogs so for that price you are probably getting a very good record for your money.

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Sometimes Tubey Magic Comes at a Fairly Steep Price

Living Stereo Hot Stamper Orchestral Titles Available Now

This famous Shaded Dog, containing two superb performances by Monteux and the LSO, has many of the Golden Age strengths and weaknesses we know well here at Better Records, having auditioned hundreds upon hundreds of these vintage pressings over the last twenty years or so. 

The wonderful sounding tube compressors that were used back in the day result in quieter passages that are positively swimming in ambience and low-level orchestral detail. Tube compression is often a large part of what we mean when we use the term Tubey Magic.

If you want to know what zero Tubey Magic sounds like, play some Telarcs or Reference Recordings from the 70s and 80s. Or a modern digital recording on CD.

But all that sweet and rich Tubey Magic comes at a price when it’s time for the orchestra to get loud.

It either can’t, or the louder passages simply distort from compressor overload.

Fortunately, on this copy the orchestra does not distort, it simply never gets as loud as it would in a real concert hall, clearly the lesser and more preferable of the two evils.

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An Overview of A Collection of Beatles Oldies But Goldies

Hot Stamper Pressings of the Music of The Beatles Available Now

We have done a number of shootouts for A Collection of Beatles Oldies over the last ten years or so, and our experimental approach using many dozens of copies provides us with strong evidence to support the following conclusions regarding the originals versus the reissues:

1.) The best of the early pressings always win our shootouts. No reissue has ever earned our top grade of A+++ and it is unlikely any reissue ever will.

2.) The reissues can be quite good, however. The best of them have earned grades of Double Plus (A++).

3.) The worst of the early pressings also earned grades of Double Plus (A++).

4.) Conclusion: if you have a bad original and a good reissue, you might be fooled into thinking the sound quality was comparable.

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